Multilevel modelling approach to analysing life course socioeconomic status and understanding missingness

Abstract

This paper investigated the extent to which parental socioeconomic status was associated with life course socioeconomic status heterogeneity between adult cohort members of the 1958 National Child Development Study and how this association differed depending on methods used to address longitudinal missing data. We compared three variants of the full information maximum likelihood approach, namely available case, complete case and partially observed case and two methods designed to compensate for missing at random data, namely multilevel multiple imputation and multiple imputation chained equations. Our results highlighted the important contribution of parental socioeconomic status in explaining the divergence in achieved socioeconomic status over the adult life course, how the available case approach increasingly overestimated socioeconomic attainment as age increased and survey sample size decreased and how the complete case approach downwardly biased the effect of parental socioeconomic status on adult socioeconomic status.